The Sacred Cut

By David Hewson

Welcome to Italian police detective Nic Costa’s Rome: the side of the city the tourist board does not want you to see.
“Hewson does more than provide a thrilling read. He saves you the airfare to Italy. When you turn the last page, you’ll think you’ve been there” LINWOOD BARCLAY
“David Hewson’s Rome is dark and tantalizing, seductive and dangerous, a place where present-day crimes ring with the echoes of history” TESS GERRITSEN
“David Hewson is one of the finest thriller writers working today” STEVE BERRY
“No author has ever brought Rome so alive for me – nor made it seem so sinister” PETER JAMES
“[Hewson is] a master plot maker” BOOKLIST
_______________________
A shocking murder. A city under siege. A serial killer who’s leaving a mark all his own.
It’s Christmas Eve and, for the first time in decades, Rome is paralysed by a blizzard. As the snow falls softly, a horrible discovery is made in the Pantheon, one of the Eternal City’s most ancient and revered architectural treasures. The body of a young woman carefully positioned on the marble floor, a gruesome carving on her back . . .
But before Detective Nic Costa and his partner Peroni can begin a formal investigation, the US Embassy brings in its own people: FBI Agents, who want the case closed down as quickly and discreetly as possible.
But Costa is determined to find out why – and as the FBI grudgingly admits to him that this corpse is not the first, the mutilations on the woman’s body point to Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man . . . and to a shocking international conspiracy that’s been festering for the past fifteen years.
Fans of Donna Leon’s Commissario Brunetti, Andrea Camilleri’s Inspector Montalbano and Michael Dibdin’s Aurelio Zen, as well as Louise Penny, Jeffey Siger and Martin Walker, will love this thrilling mystery series – perfect for readers who enjoy dark and complex character-led mysteries with multiple twists.
PRAISE FOR THE SACRED CUT:
“Stunning . . . a masterful mix of the high-concept historical thriller and the cynical contemporary Italian procedural” Booklist Starred Review
“Hewson's literate prose, bolstered by local color and historical tidbits, makes for top-flight entertainment” Kirkus Reviews

“Hewson's solid writing and multidimensional characters command attention from start to finish of this smart, literate thriller” Publishers Weekly
“Hewson is as adroit as ever in the crafting and characterizations in his tale” Rocky Mountain News
“Fully satisfying” Detroit Free Press
“A fast-paced procedural” The Sacramento Bee
“Hewson’s characters are finely drawn and consistent from book to book. He is a master at characterization . . . I highly recommend The Sacred Cut to all lovers of a good detective story and to all armchair travelers who love Rome” Blair M., 5* GoodReads review
“A must read if you like Rome, Italy or just a great thriller. You can't go wrong with this book!” Geoff, 5* GoodReads review
THE NIC COSTA MYSTERIES, IN ORDER:
1. A Season for the Dead
2. The Villa of Mysteries
3. The Sacred Cut
4. The Lizard’s Bite
5. The Seventh Sacrament
6. The Garden of Evil
7. Dante’s Numbers (aka The Dante Killings)
8. City of Fear (aka The Blue Demon)
9. The Fallen Angel
10. The Savage Shore

• Language: English
• Publisher: Severn House
• Release date: Apr 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781448301522

David Hewson

Former Sunday Times journalist David Hewson is well known for his crime-thriller fiction set in European cities. He is the author of the highly acclaimed The Killing novels set in Denmark, the Detective Nic Costa series set in Italy and the Pieter Vos series in Amsterdam. The Killing trilogy is based on the BAFTA award-winning Danish TV series created by Søren Sveistrup and produced by DR, the Danish Broadcasting Corporation. While he lives in Kent, Hewson's ability to capture the sense of place and atmosphere in his fiction comes from spending considerable research time in the cities in which the books are set: Copenhagen, Rome, Venice and Amsterdam.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

It was nine months now since she’d slipped out of Iraq, six hundred dollars in her pocket, knowing instinctively what she needed: men who owned boats and trucks, men who knew the way to places she’d only dimly heard of and who could take a little human contraband there for the right price. There’d been no work, no money at home, not since Saddam’s soldiers came from Baghdad and took her father away, leaving them alone together in the damp, cold shack that passed as a farm, with its dying crops, wilting under the oil smoke of the fields outside Kirkuk.

She’d watched the dry, dusty lane that led to their home every day for hours, waiting for him to come back, wondering when she’d hear that strong, confident adult voice again, bringing hope and security into their lives. It never happened. Instead, her mother went slowly crazy as the hope ran out, wailing at the open door for hours on end, not cleaning anything, not even talking after a while.

No one liked crazy people. No one liked the decisions they forced on others. One day a distant relative came and took both of them away, drove them for hours in a cart behind an old, stumbling donkey, then left them with an old aunt on the other side of the plumes of smoke. Just another tin shack, no money, too many mouths to feed. Her mother was completely silent after that, spent hours with her arms wrapped around herself, rocking constantly. No one talked to them much either. They only took her to school every other day: there was too much work to be done trying to dig a living out of the desiccated fields. Then soldiers came and the school closed for good. She’d watched as boxes of shells got shifted into the classrooms and wondered how she was supposed to learn anything ever again.

Over all their lives now, bigger than the oil cloud and blacker too, hung the threat of war. The family men said there’d been one before, when she was tiny. But this war would be different. This one would end matters, once and for all, make the Kurds free forever in a new kind of Iraq. They told a lot of lies. Either that or they just got things wrong. Men were stupid sometimes, anyway.

It was February when the soldiers came to occupy the farm. They were Iraqis. They behaved the way Iraqi soldiers did around Kurds. When they wanted something to eat, they came into the house and took it. When they wanted other comforts, other services, they took them too. She was scared. She was full of an internal fury too real and violent to share. She wanted to escape from this place, go somewhere new, anywhere, so long as it was in the West, where life was easier. There was no point in staying. There’d been gossip when they’d tried to sell what little produce they had in the neighbouring village one morning. About how the Iraqis killed the Kurdish men they took, put them down like animals. These whispered tales of horror turned a key in her head. Her father was dead. She’d never hear the comforting boom of his voice again. She understood now why her mother had retreated to some inner hell where no one could reach her.

So throughout each long day, as it became more and more dangerous to travel, she sat in the corner of the squalid little shack and listened to the frightened talk around her. About death and war and uncertainty, and always, always, how more soldiers would come. Peshmurga. Americans. British. Men who would, she knew, look much the same as the Iraqis when she stared into their eyes. They would sound different, wear different uniforms, but they were just men, mortal men, bringing death and chaos along with them, invisible, ghostly comrades riding in the dun-coloured jeeps.

It happened on a cold, clear April day. The Iraqis had made themselves a position next to the dank waters of the dead fish pond, by the puny patch of feeble squash plants, blackened by oil smog, at the end of their lane. Five men and a big gun pointed at the sky. They were worse than most: vicious, foul-mouthed, dangerous. Scared men, too, and she knew why. They had just the one shell, nothing more. They were sitting there, wondering how to give themselves up before the Americans came and killed them.

In the middle of the afternoon she’d watched as an ugly dark plane circled the farm, like an old metal bird wondering where to lay down its feet. She’d felt nothing, not even fear for herself. She’d stood outside the shack, ignoring the screams from behind ordering her to hide, watching the fire streak from the black bird’s belly, race through the beautiful blue sky and wrap itself around the upright cylinder of the gun before the Iraqis even had a chance to spit back their single shell.

It sent the soldiers screaming out of their sandbagged home, flames licking at their contorted bodies. She wanted to see more, wanted to make sure this memory stayed with her because it was important. So she walked closer, hid in the stinking outside toilet, looking on through the battered palm thatching as they danced and rolled on the ground.

Even now, nearly a year on, she remembered what she’d thought at that moment. The sight reminded her of the travelling troupe of clowns who used to come through the village from time to time, back when her father was alive. He always took her. One of her earliest memories was of being in his arms, watching them, almost hysterical with laughter. Even so, she was aware that there was something wrong when they returned again and again, something cruel in their humour, in the way it exaggerated the stupidity and pain of existence and invited their audience to be amused by it. She had thought about laughing at the soldiers trying to save themselves from the flames that fought to consume their bodies. There were plenty of reasons to. The Kurds hated the Iraqis. The Iraqis hated the Kurds. Everyone hated the Americans. It was a world defined by hatred and perhaps that was, in the end, why people laughed at all, because it made the pain go away, if only for a little while.

But she didn’t have the time to stare at them, try to find some amusement in their throes. At that moment Laila was thinking of herself, sure that hatred was a luxury she’d have to save for later. Somewhere here there had to be the chance of escape. Of fleeing this dying, parched land where there was nothing left for her any more, no love and no hope.

When the flames died down she walked over to the men. They were dead, contorted husks now, partly charred by the fire that had spat at them from the sky. Except for one. He clung on doggedly, trying to breathe through cracked, ruined lips, each attempt coming with pained effort. She thought he wouldn’t last much longer. So she slid her hand inside his jacket, staring all the time into his bright, frightened eyes. He mumbled something, a familiar insult, something about thieving Kurds. Then she found the envelope and he started to sob like a child.

This shocked her. She’d stared at him, affronted, and spoke in good Arabic, since she made a point of learning as many languages as possible in the old school which was now gone, books replaced by munitions boxes. ‘You should go to God like a man. Not a child.’

Then she took everything she could from him, documents, coins, a pen, a watch, reasoning they would do a dead man no good anyway, and that a world in this condition could scarcely condemn a petty thief.

He must have been rich. Maybe a member of the party. He had close to $1,500 in mixed notes in an envelope. When she checked the other corpses, carefully prising away the burnt uniforms from the flesh beneath, she found more. Some were charred but they were dollars, the magical currency, and you could buy things just by waving the curled, brown sheets at someone. A man at a border post, say. Or the village elder – and there always was one – who knew the way out, the way West, where the rich people lived.

She was down to three hundred dollars by the time she got to Istanbul two weeks later. It was a strange and beautiful place, one that scared her because of the hard way people looked into her face whenever she begged in the street.

Most of the remaining money disappeared with the series of random trucks she took through Greece then along the Adriatic coast, through Albania, Montenegro and Croatia, past a shining spring sea, past lush green fields of vines and vegetables. And wrecked buildings slowly being brought back to life. She could speak a little Italian. It was the one European language the school had taught simply because it was the only one for which they had the books. She loved the sound, too, and the pictures on the pages, of a distant city where the streets and squares had beautiful names, beautiful buildings.

The locals on the coast knew Italian. It was a language from the West, worth understanding in the hope its good fortune might touch you one day. She talked to them a little, knew the signs, understood the looks in some of the old men’s faces. There’d been a war here as well.

She gave the last hundred dollars to a burly German, who drove her over the border into Italy at Trieste, and left her, two days later, penniless, on the outskirts of Rome.

The money hadn’t covered everything. Somewhere along the way – she wasn’t sure of the day, it hadn’t seemed important to keep track of the time – she’d turned thirteen. She knew about ways to keep men happy, and tried to tell herself it was easy when you lay there to think of something else: poppies waving in the yellow corn, bread baking over burning wood, pictures of the unknown city now a few kilometres away, with its lovely buildings, its wealth, its promise of safety and happiness. And the sound of her father’s voice, singing in the fields. That was the warmest memory, one that she prayed would never disappear.

And when it was over, when he’d let her out of the cab on some grim housing estate in the suburbs, a place of dark, threatening streets, – nothing like the Rome she’d imagined – she’d made a decision. Stealing was better than this. Stealing allowed her a little personal dignity. It would keep her alive until … what?

Back on that warm day in early summer she hadn’t known the answer. Now, in December, with the city shivering under a vicious and unexpected burst of snow, she was no closer to it. Each day was a new battle fought using the same weapons: keen eyes, agile hands. The charities had thrown her out for stealing. The street people rejected her because she wouldn’t stoop to the tricks they used – selling themselves, selling dope. She was a world away from a home that no longer existed, alone in an empty piazza in the heart of Rome, looking at something that could only be a temple, one almost as old as some of those back in the place she now struggled to think of as home.

She’d followed the man all the way from the narrow street near the Spanish Steps, after she saw him leave a doorway next to a small store selling Gucci. He looked interesting somehow. The right type. So she’d followed him, and it wasn’t easy. He kept ducking out of the way as if he was hiding too. Then she lost him again, turned the corner, found herself in the square. The temple was a kind of sanctuary, she thought.

The girl stared at the huge doors shut tightly against the freezing blast and wondered what the place was like inside.

A sanctuary could be warm. It could have something to steal.

She walked along to the side of the building, under the shadow of the gigantic pillars and the curious writing above them, down a low path towards the light in a narrow side entrance.

The door was just ajar. Snow was dancing around her like a wraith caught in the hushed breath of a newborn storm. She walked into a small, modern cubicle, which led into the dark, airy interior beyond, hearing voices. A man and a woman, foreign, American probably, were making sounds she didn’t quite understand.

She was cold. She was curious. She slunk into the shadows, somewhat in awe of the building’s size and majesty, slid behind a fluted column, then let her eyes adjust to the scene in the centre, lit by the moon falling through a giant, open disc at the focal point of the roof.

Close by, thrown on a bench, lay a man’s coat and jacket. They looked good quality. There could be any amount of money in there, enough to see her through until the snow disappeared.

The two people inside were some distance away. The woman’s clothes were strewn across the geometric stone pattern of the floor. She lay naked in the very centre of the hall. Quite still now, her arms and legs outstretched in an odd, artificial manner, as if each limb were pointing to an invisible angle somewhere in the circular building.

It was wrong to watch. Laila understood that, but her mind fought to interpret what was happening in front of her in the icy, airy heart of this strange, dead place. She thought she had seen everything the world had to offer back in Iraq. Then something caught the moonlight. Something sharp and silver and terrifying, a slender line of surgical metal, hovering over the figure on the floor. And she knew she was mistaken.

MERCOLEDÌ

The two plain clothes cops huddled in the doorway of a closed farmacia in Via del Corso, shivering, teeth chattering, watching Mauro Sandri, the fat little photographer from Milan, fumble with the two big Nikon SLRs dangling round his neck. It was five days before Christmas and for once Rome was enjoying snow, real snow, deep and crisp and even, the kind you normally only saw on the TV when some snap blizzard engulfed those poor miserable bastards living in the north.

It fell from the black sky as a perfect, silky cloud. Thick flakes curled around the gaudy coloured lights of the street decorations in a soft, white embrace. The pavements already owned a crunchy, shoe-deep covering in spite of the milling crowds who had pounded the Corso’s black stones a few hours earlier, searching for last-minute presents in the stores.

Nic Costa and Gianni Peroni had read the met briefing before they went on duty that evening. They’d looked at the words ‘severe weather warning’ and tried to remember what that meant. Floods maybe. Gales that brought down some of the ancient tiles which sat so unsteadily on the rooftops of the centro storico, the warren of streets and alleys in the city’s Renaissance quarter where they spent most of their working lives. But this was different. The met men said it would snow and snow and snow. Snow in a way it hadn’t for almost twenty years, since the last big freeze in 1985. Only for longer this time, a week or more. And the temperatures would hit new lows too. Maybe it was global warming. Maybe it was just a trick throw of the meteorological dice. Whatever, the world was about to become seriously out of sync for a little while and that knowledge, shared among the two and a half million or more individuals who lived within the boundaries of the Comune di Roma, was both scary and tantalizing. The city was braced for its first white Christmas in living memory and already the consequences of this were beginning to seep into the Roman consciousness. People were preparing to bunk off work for any number of sound and incontrovertible reasons. They’d picked up the throat bug that was creeping through the city. They couldn’t take the buses in from the suburbs because, even if they made it through the dangerous, icy streets, who knew if they’d get back in the evening? Life was, for once, just too perilous to do anything but stay at home, or maybe wander down to the local bar and talk about nothing except the weather.

And they were all, librarian and shop assistant, waiter and tour guide, priest and shivering cop, thinking secretly: This is wonderful. Because for once Christmas would be a holiday. For once the city would step off the constantly moving escalator of modern life, remember to take a deep breath, close its eyes and sleep a little, all under that gorgeous, ermine coverlet that kept falling in a constant white cloud, turning the black stones of the empty streets to the colour of icing sugar.

Peroni glanced at his partner, an expression Costa now recognized, one that said: watch this. Then the big cop from Tuscany walked over and threw an arm around Sandri, squeezing him hard.

‘Hey, Mauro,’ he growled, and crushed the photographer one more time before letting go. ‘Your fingers are frozen stiff. It’s pitch dark here with nothing to look at but snow. Why don’t you quit taking photos for a while? You must’ve done a couple of hundred today already. Relax. We could go someplace warm. Come on. Even you clever guys could handle a caffè corretto on a night like this.’

The photographer’s round, bulbous eyes blinked back at them suspiciously. He flexed his shoulders, maybe to shrug off the cold, maybe to get back some feeling after experiencing Peroni’s muscular grip.

‘This would be a duty break, right? I can still shoot if I want to?’

Nic Costa listened to Sandri’s squeaky northern tones, sighed and put a restraining hand on his partner’s arm, worried that Peroni’s temper just might take a turn in the wrong direction. The photographer had been doing the rounds of the Questura all month. He was a nice enough guy, an arty type who’d been given some kind of government grant to create a documentary record of the station’s work. He’d photographed all manner of people: traffic cops and forensic, the lunatics from the morgue, the paper-monkeys in clerical. Costa had seen some of his work already: a set of moody monochrome prints of the warders working the cells. They weren’t half bad. And he had noted the man’s steady progress around the station, understanding the greedy, interested gaze Sandri gave him and Peroni every time they crossed his path. Mauro was a photographer. He thought in visual terms, nothing much else in all probability. He must have looked at Nic Costa, small, slight, young, like an athlete who’d somehow quit the track, set him, in his mind, against the big, bulking frame of his partner, more than twenty years older and with an ugly, violently disfigured face no one ever forgot, and felt his shutter finger start to itch.

Gianni Peroni surely knew that too. He was used to sideways glances, for his looks and his history. He’d been inspector in vice for years until, almost a year before, he’d been busted down to the ranks for one simple slip-up, when he’d tasted the goods he was supposed to be investigating. All for a private, internalized reason he’d later shared with one person only, the partner who pounded the street alongside him. That didn’t stop an intelligent man, one who could read an expression even on Peroni’s battered features, seeing the two of them together and understanding there was a story there. It was inevitable that Sandri would pick them as his subject one day. Inevitable, too, that Gianni Peroni would see it as a challenge to ride the photographer a touch hard along the way.

‘You can still shoot, Mauro,’ Costa said and caught a glimpse of a resentful twinkle in Peroni’s bright, beady eye.

He took his partner’s arm again and whispered, ‘They’re just pictures, Gianni. You know the great thing about pictures?’

‘Tell me, Professor,’ Peroni murmured, watching Sandri struggle to work another 35 mm cassette into his Nikon.

‘They only show what’s on the surface. The rest you make up. You write your own story. You imagine your own beginning and your own ending. They’re fiction pretending to be truth.’

Peroni nodded. He wasn’t his normal self just then, Costa thought. There were dark, complex thoughts rumbling around deep inside a head that temperamentally liked to avoid such places.

‘Maybe. But does this particular fiction have a caffè corretto inside it?’

Costa coughed into a gloved hand and stamped his feet, thinking about the taste of a big slug of grappa hidden inside a double espresso and how little activity there could be on a night such as this, when even the most crooked Roman hoods would surely be thinking of nothing but a warm bed.

‘I believe it does,’ he answered, and scanned the deserted street, where just a single 62 bus was now struggling down the centreline at a snail’s pace, trying to keep from slipping into the gutter.

Costa stepped out from the shelter of the doorway, pulling the collar of his thick black coat up into his neck, shielding his eyes from the blizzard with a frozen hand, then darted into an alley, towards the distant yellow light struggling from the tiny doorway of what he guessed just might be the last bar open in Rome.

There proved to be the only three customers in the tiny café down the alley beyond the Galleria Doria Pamphili, among the dark tangle of ancient streets that ran west towards the Pantheon and Piazza Navona. Now Costa stood with Gianni Peroni at one end of the counter, trying to calm down the big man before something untoward happened. Mauro Sandri was crouched on a stool a good distance away, concentrating hard on polishing the lenses on his damn cameras, not even touching the booze-rich caffè Peroni had bought him before war broke out.

The owner, a tall, skeletal man in his fifties, with a white nylon jacket, scrappy brown moustache and brushedback greased grey hair, looked at the three of them in turn and declared very firmly, ‘Were this up to me, I’d slap the guy around a little, Officer. I mean, you got to have limitations. There’s public places and there’s private places. If a man can’t get a little peace and quiet when he wanders into the pisser and gets his cazzo out, what’s this world coming to? That’s what I want to know. That and when you people are getting the hell out of here. If you weren’t police I’d be closed already. A man don’t pay the mortgage selling three coffees in an hour, and I don’t see anyone else showing up for this party either.’

He was right. Costa had seen just a couple of figures scurrying through the snow when they trudged to the bar. Now it was just solid white beyond the door. Anyone with sense was, surely, snug at home, swearing not to set foot outside until the blizzard ended and some sunlight turned up to disclose what Rome looked like after an extraordinary night like this.

Gianni Peroni had downed his coffee and added an extra grappa on top, which was unlike the man. He sat hunched on an ancient rickety stool, designed to be as uncomfortable as possible so no one lingered, staring mutely at the bottles behind the bar. It wasn’t Sandri’s stupid trick with the camera that had caused this. Costa knew that all along. Trying to get a picture of Peroni taking a piss – vérité was what Mauro had called it – was just the final straw that had pushed the big man over the edge.

They’d discussed this already earlier that evening when Costa had quietly asked if everything was OK. It all came out in a rush. What was really bugging Peroni was the fact he wouldn’t see his kids this Christmas, for the first time ever.

‘I’ll get Mauro to apologize,’ Costa said now. ‘He didn’t mean anything, Gianni. You had the measure of the guy straight away. He just does this, all the time. Taking pictures.’

Besides, Costa thought, it could have been quite something too. He could easily imagine a grainy black-and-white shot of Peroni’s hulking form, shot from the back, shrinking into the corner of the bar’s grubby urinal, looking like an out-take from some fifties shoot in Paris by Cartier-Bresson. Sandri had an eye for a picture. Costa half blamed himself. When Peroni dashed for the toilet door and Sandri’s eyes lit up, he should surely have seen what was coming.

‘I’ve bought all the presents, Nic,’ Peroni moaned, those piggy eyes twinkling back at him, the scarred face full of guilt and pain. ‘How the hell do I get them to Siena now with this shitty weather everywhere? What are they going to think of me, on top of everything else?’

‘Phone them. They know what it’s like here. They’ll understand.’

‘They will?’ Peroni snapped. ‘What the fuck do you know about kids, huh?’

Costa took his hand off Peroni’s huge, hunched shoulder, shrugged and said nothing. Peroni had two children: a girl of thirteen, a boy of eleven. He never seemed to be able to think of them as anything but helpless infants. It was one of the traits Costa admired in his partner. To the world he looked like a bruised, scarred thug, the last kind of man anyone would want to meet on a dark night. And it was all an act. Underneath Peroni was just a straightforward, honest, old-fashioned family man, one who’d stepped out of line once and paid the heaviest price.

‘Oh, crap.’ Peroni sighed. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. I don’t want to lash out at you. I don’t even want to lash out at Mauro over there.’

‘That’s good to know,’ Costa replied, then added, ‘if there’s anything I can do …’

‘Such as what?’ Peroni asked.

‘It’s an expression, Gianni. It’s a way a friend has of saying, No, I haven’t the first idea how I can help, and the truth is I probably can’t do a thing. But if I could, I would. Understood?’

A low, croaking snort of semi-amusement escaped Peroni’s throat. ‘OK, OK. I am contrite. I repent my sins.’ His scarred face screwed up with distaste aimed, it seemed to Costa, somewhere deep inside himself. ‘Some more than others.’

Then he shot a vicious look at Sandri, huddled over the Nikons. ‘I want that film, though. I’m not having my pecker pasted all over the notice board for everyone to see. They told the guy he could follow us around and take pictures. They didn’t say he could walk straight after us into the pisser.’

‘Mauro says there’s really nothing there. People wouldn’t even see it was you. And maybe it’s a good picture, Gianni. Think of it.’

The battered face wrinkled into a set expression of scepticism. ‘It’s a picture of a man taking a piss. Not the Mona Lisa.’

Costa had tried to talk art to Peroni before. It didn’t work. Peroni was irretrievably romantic at heart, still stuck on the idea of beauty. Truth came somewhere far behind. And it occurred to Costa too that maybe there was more to the big man’s misery then the genuine distress he felt at being separated from his kids. There was also the matter of the relationship he had struck up with Teresa Lupo, the pathologist working at the police morgue. It was meant to be a secret, but secrets never really stayed hidden for long inside the Questura. Peroni was dating the likeable, wayward Teresa and it was common knowledge. When Costa found out, a couple of weeks before, he had thought long and hard about it and had come to the conclusion that they might, just, make a good couple. If Peroni could swallow down his guilt. If Teresa could keep her life straight for long enough to make things work once the initial flush of mad enthusiasm that came with any affair subsided into the routine of everyday existence.

‘Gimme a cappuccino,’ Costa said to the barman. ‘It’s going to be a long, cold night out there.’

There was a howl of protest from behind the counter. ‘It’s nearly twelve, for God’s sake. What am I running here? A soup kitchen for cops?’

‘Gimme one too,’ Sandri said from the other end of the bar, pushing away his cold corretto. ‘Get one for all of us. I’m paying.’

Then the photographer walked over, looked Peroni in the eye and placed a 35 mm film cassette in his hand.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Really. I shouldn’t have done it like that. It’s just …’

Peroni waited for an explanation. When it didn’t come, he asked, ‘Just what?’

‘I knew you’d have said no. I apologize, OK? I was wrong. But you have to understand this, Peroni. If a man like me had to ask every time he took a photograph, there’d hardly be any pictures in the world. All those ones you remember. All those ones you think are important. They came from some guy with a camera who pointed the stupid thing while no one was really taking any notice and went … pop. Improvisation. Speed. That’s what this job’s all about. Stealing other people’s moments.’

Peroni looked him up and down and considered this.

‘A little like your job, huh?’ Sandri said.

The barman slid three coffees down the counter, spilling milk and foam everywhere.

‘Listen, assholes, this is the last,’ he snarled. ‘Do you think you could possibly just pay for them then go steal a few moments some place else, huh? I’d like to go to bed and count the seven and a bit euros I earned tonight. And I got to open those doors at six thirty tomorrow morning, not that anyone’s going to be walking through them.’

Costa had downed one mouthful of hot, milky coffee and foam when the radio went. Peroni was looking at him hungrily as he took the call. They had to get out of the bar, they had to find something to do. If they stayed any longer, they’d never leave.

‘Burglar alarm,’ Costa said when he’d listened to the message from the control room. ‘The Pantheon. We’re the closest.’

‘Ooh,’ Peroni cooed. ‘A burglar alarm. Did you hear that, Mauro? Maybe we’ve got some wild action after all. Maybe all those bums who hang around there fleecing the tourists are breaking in, looking for somewhere warm to spend the night.’

‘Damn stupid thing to do if they are,’ Sandri said immediately, looking puzzled.

‘In weather like this?’ Peroni asked.

‘It’s got a hole in the roof the size of a swimming pool,’ Sandri replied. ‘The oculus. Remember? It’s going to be as cold in there as it is outside. Colder even. Like a freezer. And nothing to steal either, not unless you can remove a few marble tombs without someone noticing.’

Peroni gave him a friendly slap on the shoulder. Not too hard this time. ‘You know for a guy who talks art you’re OK really, Mauro. You can take pictures of me all you want. Outside the crapper.’ Then he gave Costa a querulous look. ‘Are we calling the boss? He sounded desperate.’

Costa wondered about Leo Falcone. He had made a point of insisting he could be easily disturbed. ‘For a burglar alarm?’

Peroni nodded. ‘Leo doesn’t say those things without a reason. He wants out of that place.’

‘I guess so.’ Costa pulled out his phone as they walked to the door and the white world beyond, feeling somewhat uneasy that Leo Falcone was so reluctant to spend a little leisure time with his superiors. And thinking all the while too about what Mauro Sandri had said.

There was no point in anyone breaking into the Pantheon. None at all.

Leo Falcone listened to the drone of men’s voices echo around the private room in Al Pompiere, the stiff, old-fashioned first-floor restaurant in the ghetto where, by tradition, they met once a year just before Christmas. Then he looked at their heavy business coats, lined up on the hangers by the wall like black, dead-animal skins, and turned his head towards the window, wishing he was somewhere – anywhere – else.

The snow was now falling in a steady, persistent stream. Falcone took his mind off the dinner for a moment and wondered what the weather meant for the days to come. He liked to work Christmas. Most divorced men did. Those without kids anyway. He’d seen the quick, internal flash of disappointment on Gianni Peroni’s face earlier in the week when the new rotas had been posted, and Peroni and Costa had realized they would both be on duty over the holiday. Peroni had hoped to go home to Tuscany for a brief reunion with his estranged family. Falcone had wondered, for a moment, whether he could arrange that. Then he’d checked himself. Peroni was just another cop now. He had to live with the hours just like everyone else. That’s what duty was about. That and turning out for an annual dinner with a bunch of faceless grey men from SISDE, the civilian intelligence service, men who never really said what they meant or what, in truth, they wanted.

The seating arrangements were preordained: one cop, one spook, arranged in turn around the white starched cloth and the highly polished silverware. Falcone sat at the window end of the long banqueting table next to Filippo Viale, who now smoked a cigar and clutched a glass of old chardonnay grappa as clear as water, his second of the evening. Falcone had listened to Viale’s quiet, insistent voice throughout the meal, picking at the food: a deep-fried artichoke to start, a plate of rigatoni con la pajata, pasta seated beneath calf’s intestines sautéed with the mother’s milk still inside, then, as secondo a serving of bony lamb scottadito served alongside a head of torsello chicory stuffed with anchovies. It was the kind of food Al Pompiere was known for, and, like his dinner companion, not to Falcone’s more modern taste.

Viale had been his point man with the SISDE since Falcone made inspector ten years before. In theory that meant they liaised with one another on an equal basis from time to time, when the two services needed to share information. In reality Falcone couldn’t remember a single occasion on which Viale or any other of the grey men, as he thought of them, were ever of real assistance. There’d been plenty of calls from Viale, fishing for information, asking for a favour. Usually Falcone had complied because he knew what the cost of reluctance would be: a call to an appointment upstairs and an icy interrogation from his superiors, asking what the problem was. Before he was promoted, he’d thought the grey men’s power was on the wane. That was in the early nineties, when the Cold War was over and terrorism seemed a thing of the past. A time of optimism, as he saw it now, when a younger Falcone, still married, still with some sense of hope, was able to believe the world was becoming a smarter place, one that grew a little wiser, a little more safe, with every passing year.

Then the circle turned again. New enemies, faceless ones with no particular flag to identify them, emerged out of nowhere. While the police and the Carabinieri struggled to hold the fort against a rising swell tide of crime using increasingly meagre and conventional resources, the funding went to the grey men, filling their coffers for operations that never came under any public scrutiny. There was a shift in the moral fulcrum. For some in government the end came to justify the means. This was, Falcone knew, the state of the world he would probably have to work with, for the rest of his professional life. That knowledge didn’t make it any easier to bear. Nor was he flattered by the grey men’s apparent belief that they saw something in Leo Falcone they wanted.

‘Leo,’ Viale said quietly, ‘I have to ask. I know we’ve been through this before. But still … it puzzles me.’

‘I don’t want another job.’ Falcone sighed, hearing a note of testiness in his voice. ‘Can’t we just leave it at that?’

They’d been trying to recruit him off and on for a good four years or more. Falcone was never quite certain how genuine Viale’s offer was. It was a standard SISDE trick to hold out lures to men in the conventional force. It flattered them, made them feel there could be a future somewhere else if life got too difficult in the Questura.

Viale downed the grappa and ordered another. The waiter, who was handing around a very old-fashioned sponge cake as dessert, took the glass and returned with it filled immediately. Viale was a regular here, Falcone guessed. Maybe he had booked the dinner. Maybe he was the boss. SISDE officers never said much about their rank. By rights Falcone was supposed to be matched against someone near his own position in the hierarchy. He didn’t know Viale well. Like so many SISDE officers, the man was infuriatingly anonymous: a dark suit, a pale, nondescript face, a head of black hair, dyed in all probability, and a demeanour that embraced many smiles and not a touch of warmth or humour. Falcone couldn’t even put a finger on his age. Viale wasn’t the physical type. He was of medium height, slightly built, with a distinct paunch. Yet Falcone felt sure there was something more serious about the man than he allowed. Viale didn’t sit behind the same kind of desk as he did, nor did he have to tackle the same, incessant trinity of problems: detection, intelligence and resources. Viale was, somehow, a man who made his own life and there, Leo Falcone thought, was something to envy.

Viale put a slight hand on Falcone’s arm and looked directly into his face. There was

Reviews for The Sacred Cut

[judithrs · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Sacred Cut. David Hewson. 2006. A Season for the Dead, is the first novel in this series about an modern day policeman in Rome and Sacred Cut was a good as I remember the first one being. I plan to get the others in the series. It is obvious that Hewson has spent a lot of time in Rome. His descriptions of Rome bring back memories of my brief visit. I love the description of the city and its historic sites! Nic Costa, the main character and his partner are forced to work with a seedy FBI agent and a slimy Italian secret service guy to catch a serial killer who turns out to be a wrong CIA operative. This is a suspenseful, exciting mystery with great characters.

[nuit_2 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The plot development and twists are intriguing and make it difficult to put down. I found that the beginning of the book was the best part of this book witht the descriptions about the snowfall in Rome. The ending was fantastic, really different; there was no blood or dead people. A change from other books.

[jessicasim · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

David Hewson's "The Sacred Cut" makes a good read for anyone who likes crime stories with a twist. The story takes place in Rome, and on top of that the culprit seems to have a religious obsession which makes him kill, seemingly, random people in buildings that look like the Pantheon in Rome. Despite this the story does not contain a complicated religious conspiracy like you would find with, for instance, Dan Brown. What I also liked is that the Italian police offers very basic and efficient crime solving, whilst the American FBI agent seems to have a hot temper and is quick to jump to conclusions. This is the complete opposite of the common prejudices of efficient Americans and arrogant, lazy Italians who always have some kind of deal going on somewhere instead of doing honest work. The writer knows his way around Rome and his descriptions of the city make a really nice setting. Anyone familiar with the city would be thrilled to remember the places he chose as a background and feel like they are wandering around in Rome with the detectives to solve this intricate case.This was the first David Hewson book that I read and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I am looking forward to reading more of his work.

[edwinkort · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Kwam niet echt in het verhaal. Startte traag, maar had wel genoeg actie om je bezig te houden. Begon er een beetje genoeg van te krijgen te lezen dat Peroni door een fout van hem bij de 'gewone' politie terecht kwam. De reden daar van was al in het [b:Het Bacchus offer|44901518|Het Bacchus offer|David Hewson|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1554743658s/44901518.jpg|69558135] uitgelegd, en nu ook weer diverse keren.

Wat gebeurde er verder met dat meisje Laila?

Over het algemeen zijn dit leuke verhalen om te lezen op vakantie, omdat ze makkelijk weg te leggen zijn.

[bcquinnsmom · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Absolutely wonderful! Sadly now I have to wait a year for the next one (The Lizard's Bite), because I can't wait until these books come out in paperback & I have to buy them when they're first released. Kind of like waiting for the next Harry Potter novel. If you have read Hewson's work before, then I definitely can recommend this installment (3rd in the Nic Costa series); if you like a well-written mystery that doesn't insult your intelligence, then I can recommend it to you and if you enjoy a good conspiracy yarn & a view of Italy, then you will liek this one. If you want a cute little cozy yarn, skip it. I think Hewson writes mysteries the way they should be written, although I must say I had most of it figured out early on. Normally I hate that, but in this case, it's okay...it was the getting there that was really the fun part.brief lookThe Pantheon, built by Hadrian in antiquity is the scene to which Nic Costa & his partner Gianni Peroni are called to investigate a murder. The most major snowfall in years is falling in the background, and the body has been covered by it. The dead woman has been positioned on the floor, and in her back is carved something that looks like Da Vinci's famous Vitruvian Man (you know, the one with the man in the square in the circle). But wait...before you start screaming oh god, another DVC ripoff, don't. The investigation that follows leads our friends to become (unhappily) involved with the FBI, who are playing their cards very closely and not revealing more than they need the police to know. As Costa, Peroni, Falcone and Crazy Teresa get more involved, they realize that there's more here than meets the eye -- and find a mystery/conspiracy that it may not be healthy for them to become involved in. Very well done; I couldn't stop reading once I started it. YAY...more more more!!!

[momsterbookworm · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

It's an OK read. It started out on a good premise, but didn't quite deliver. This is how it begins: The body of a woman is found in the Pantheon, mutilated by some diagram carved into her back, and the body arranged in semblance to the diagram of the Vitruvian Man. So here I am looking for an enigmatic read, full of symbolism and mystery -- instead it leans towards inter-agency politics and jurisdiction. The plot does unfold in due course, but because of the heavy lean, took the wind out of the sails of this one. Does not quite cut it for me.

[smik_3 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

For the first time in two decades, Rome is paralysed by a blizzard. And a gruesome discovery is made in the Pantheon, one of the city's most ancient and revered architectural treasures.Covered by soft snow is the body of a an American tourist - her back horribly mutilated...But before Nic Costa, Gianni Peroni and Inspector Falcone can begin their murder investigation the US Embassy has descended on the scene. FBI agent Joel Leapman wants the investigation under his own personal command. His assistant Emily Deacon turns out to have her own personal reasons for wanting to bring the killer to book. Sidelined, the three Roman cops are determined to discover why the inquiry is so sensitive. And as the FBI grudgingly admits that this corpse is not the first, the mutilations of the woman's body point to a sinister secret buried deep in a conspiracy mired in the history of two bloody wars in Iraq.